Recently, with the encouragement of Abletech Director Nigel Ramsay, we looked at how our company is contributing to CO2 emissions. Nigel has written about his family’s improvements. Next we looked at Abletech.
Where do you start? The New Zealand Sustainable Business Network has lots of great advice. It has published a very good paper on how to calculate your carbon emissions. Following their advice and using the recommended ACE Carbon Calculator, which is an independently developed New Zealand specific tool, NZ is now starting to understand our companies’ contributions to CO2 emissions.
With just two months of tracking under our belts we can see that Transport, specifically flights, is our biggest contributor. The big difference between October and November flights is that we had some international travel. As a rule we seek to minimise travel, and use video conferencing, but sometimes face-to-face meetings have to happen. Now we are understanding our baseline CO2 emissions this will allow us to target reductions.
Electricity is our second highest contributor to our carbon footprint. This is an area where we have already started making changes. Earlier this year we visited the EcoCentre run by the Wellington Sustainability Trust, after that visit we came away with some things we could do at work, and at home, to improve our energy efficiency.
In our office, for point heating solutions, specifically our meeting rooms, we have adopted efficient radiant heaters with motion sensors so they are only in use when required.
We have also installed WiFi Smart Switches on high-power-use items such as our coffee machine and fresh air venting system, so these power consumers can be switched off when our office is closed. The smart switch is WiFi controlled and enables scheduled On/Off switching with an easy-to-use app.
We are just at the beginning of understanding our CO2 emissions baseline. But as Peter Drucker says:
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it
We have now started to measure so that we can improve.
Read more
- Part 2 of our growing understanding of our emissions
